7 Methods for Secure Credit Card Transactions

Stay Credit Safe With These 7 Tips

The world’s most intelligent place, “The Internet” has now become the world’s scariest place. People are finding out ways to get into someone else’s private stuff and make easy money. This has given rise to “hackers” who are regularly on a hunt of a new prey.

Shopping and bill payments have become really easy with online payment mode. No queues, no stress and no wastage of time, everything is just one click away.

You might be a regular user of online payment. And you might sometimes feel a bit hesitant before an online payment? Do you? What if your card information is not safe? What if someone is tracking your payment? What if I lose money to some stranger who hacks into the online portal at the time of payment?

These are a few questions that might have hovered in your mind. Worry no more; here are 7 methods that you should follow in order to make a secure credit card transaction.

1.Passwords

You should always keep a password which is hard to crack. Your password should include upper case characters, lower case characters, symbols and numeric as well.

All this together will surely increase the strength of your password and will keep your credit card payment safer. Don’t use the same username and password on all the accounts.

This will make you an easy target. Do not share your details with anyone, as doing so will keep your card safe. Even when you think you have made an unbreakable password keep changing it time and again.

Do not engage yourself in clicking on links that ask you about your identification codes and stuff.

2.Do not access online portals here

Yeah, I know you get a bit greedy whenever you enter a free Wi-Fi zone but if you want to keep your credit card safe do not use the Wi-Fi for any online payment.

Do not shop or input your credit card’s credential for any bill payment. Doing so will keep you away from risking your highly sensitive data.

If you want to shop, pay bills or access your credit card online account do all this at home, or when you have a private data connection.

Moreover stay away from links that say, “Easy pay”, “one-click ordering” as most of these are fraud cases.

It will take you a few seconds to enter your username and the password for a secure payment but when you lose money to fraud sites it will take a lot of time to recover that money. Lastly when you prefer using the browser over an application of particular merchandise then do use an up-to-date browser.

3.Safety first

If you often use your credit card for payments then before visiting any financial and sales website do check their authenticity or else your card details can be compromised.

During any payment, be it a shopping website or financial web pages do look for the “s” at the end of https in the link. This s stands for safety.

To recheck the authenticity of a particular website you can just click on the logo of the company and do the digging. It is the simplest way to check.

If you possess more than one credit card use just one card for paying online. This will keep your other cards safe if at all you land up to a site which is a fraud.

4.Make no errors

Yeah I know, we all are humans and making errors is not in our hands. But we surely can minimize it. Can’t we?

But what we should be cautious about is making least to no errors while we are making any payment on an online payment gateway. A slight mistake and we can land into a pit of debts.

When you see an error on the website’s page; make sure not to keep trying on it. Let it be like that for some time and try doing the same after some time.

Don’t go to every website to pay online, trusting everybody around is one big mistake you would not want to do.

Also Read: 6 Things to know before applying for a credit card in 2018

5.Check for a seal to trust

Whenever you are paying online on any website there is a lock symbol that is made on the website. This symbol is nothing but an assurance that will keep your transaction safe.

This isn’t a perfect solution that will keep your transaction safe but then with this symbol on your payment portal, you can feel a lot relaxed and safe.

You can see for the VeriSign, Bureau symbol, or TRUSTe. Most of the websites have one of these. Surely these seals can also be faked on certain web pages but isn’t it better than no seal at all?

6.An anti-virus is always helpful

What helps you to save your computer from crashing or from misbehaving? Yeah, it is the anti-virus. You would surely agree with me if I say, “Every computer needs an Anti-virus for protection.

If you do not have any protection on your laptop you make yourself an easy target for security breaches and cyber-attacks.

It might sound very foolish or inappropriate but yes, if you have a trusted software in your lappy all your transactions will be much safer.

Keep a good anti-virus and keep updating it regularly for the best results. Even if you are not that tech-gifted there is nothing to worry, most of these stuff update automatically.

7.Keep an email security

It wouldn’t be wise if you would not keep your email id as your back-up. Store some data (obviously not the sensitive one) for quick use.

During a payment, if any email or another site pops up don’t get involved in it. Just close the site as well as the window you were working on and shut down your device for some time.

Later to this don’t just start the internet directly, first do a quick virus scan as well as spyware scan. After this log into your account for experiencing a safe payment from your credit card.

Ankur is 26 year old Digital Marketer by profession, with a B-tech Degree from N.S.I.T (Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology), Dwarka, India. He teaches Digital Marketing at his website www.AnkurAggarwal.in